Upgrading to new hard drive, best solution to migrate all data?

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gt4130bmx

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my gaming rig consists of a solid state drive for the OS and most applications, meanwhile i have a 500GB WD black drive that contains all documents data, games, music whatever... pushing 85 percent capacity now,i purchased a 1 TB WD black hard drive on order. my question is what methods today will work best to migrate all the data over. I currently have a bootable disc for Norton Ghost 11. a great software i used in the past to make a snapshot duplicate in the past. I'm just wondering will there be compatibility issues with this older ghost software, i think it goes back to 2006 lol. for windows 10 or newer hardware changes will i want to use something newer? any other software recommendations? I got a couple days till my new drive comes in and just want to be prepared to make the migration happen quick and easy!
 
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Actually, esco_sid is right in that if all the OP wants to do is copy (or move) his non-OS data from one drive to another drive he could, of course, simply use the system's copy/move functions to do that. (I guess because the OP's comments emphasized cloning programs we (or at least I) focused on that aspect).

On the other hand, we frequently employ a disk-cloning program to clone the contents of a data drive to another drive, especially when the volume of data is considerable and it's much, much quicker to use a d-c program to effect the transfer of data. So it really depends on the situation.
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engineer5261

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Apr 26, 2016
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If you JUST got a new hard drive, just clone it using a disk cloning software. Cloning will clone the OS as well as the boot sectors (just copying will not do this) and any other data you may have. I cant recall which software I used last time I cloned a drive, but it was the best way for me to change the boot drive when I upgraded an SSD.
 
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ArtPog

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The last Norton Ghost disk-program we worked with regularly was the Norton Ghost 2003 program. By & large it worked like a dream back in the pre-historic age of Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows 98. When XP came along problems began to surface with that Norton program and we finally had to give it up. We worked with a variety of Norton Ghost updates after that but they were all dogs. We finally gave up on that program. If you could work with Norton 11 with recent versions of Windows OSs I would consider you a miracle-worker. But who knows until you've tried, right?

The disk-cloning program we've been using for many years now is the Casper program (http://www.fssdev.com). However, it's a commercial program costing $49.99 so relatively few PC users are interested in it since most users are exclusively interested in a "one-shot" disk-cloning ("data migration") operation cloning the contents of their HDD to a new SSD, and there are quite a few freely-available programs available on the net that have that capability. Two of the more popular ones are Macrium Reflect Free and Easeus Todo Backup. So you may want to look into them.

(BTW, you may want to also look into the Casper program since there's a free Trial Edition available for download - see https://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/trial/
The Trial Version has some limitations involving the cloning of individual partitions, but works fine for a disk-to-disk cloning operation.
We use the Casper program nearly exclusively to maintain frequent comprehensive backups of our systems).
 
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gt4130bmx

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I want to add that yest this is just a Data drive, the operating system is not present on this drive. I just need to mirror an exact copy of my drive from the 500 GB to the new 1 Tb drive. my proffered method is a software that cab be booted either by USB or CD. this i prefer only because i can disconnect the solid state drive to eliminate it completely from the issue of being the mistaken used drive... a minor issue yes but id still rather have it out and just the existing data drive and its soon to be clone present
 
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ArtPog

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Sep 17, 2014
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Actually, esco_sid is right in that if all the OP wants to do is copy (or move) his non-OS data from one drive to another drive he could, of course, simply use the system's copy/move functions to do that. (I guess because the OP's comments emphasized cloning programs we (or at least I) focused on that aspect).

On the other hand, we frequently employ a disk-cloning program to clone the contents of a data drive to another drive, especially when the volume of data is considerable and it's much, much quicker to use a d-c program to effect the transfer of data. So it really depends on the situation.
 
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engineer5261

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I completely misread that. I thought OP wanted to close his OS disk. My mistake. Yes you can copy paste all the data, but links will become invalid if the drive letter changes so be mindful of that.
 
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engineer5261

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Or you can slot all 3 drives into your computer, and ensure you are copying to/from correct drives by checking their capacity/size from rightclick>properties since each drive has a unique size. Would save you a lot of trouble.
 
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gt4130bmx

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using a cloning software just seemed easiest from the start for me but now you also sparked a new question i have. my hard drive does contain the pagefile for my computer... do a full hard drive copy to copy and then later changing that drive letter to match it so all directories and shortcuts are identical... this wont make any difference?
 
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